Taken Under
by Lara-Van
Summary: This is the story of how I lived for the love of a man who would never love me back. This is the story of how I died." A woman is consumed by her dreams of a man named Peter Petrelli. Hard to summarize, just read it if you're at ALL interested.
1. Chapter 1

**Title: Taken Under**

**Author: Lara-Van**

**Rating: PG-13 **

**Pairings: a little bit of Peter/OC, but really Peter/Emma**

**Spoilers: There are some spoilerish moments, particularly those concerning Emma. So if you don't want to know my spin, don't read. **

**A/N: Thanks for reading! This is going to be very short (for me), just a few chapters. It was inspired by the song Taking Over Me by Evanescence. And also a couple of other Evanescence songs. And yes, the OC _is_**** named after Amy Lee in tribute to that fact. **

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"This is the story of how I lived for the love of a man who would never love me. This is the story of how I died."

~*~

I was twenty-four when I first had the dream. Or rather, when I dreamed _him_. At first, they were few and far between. Every couple of months, I would see his face in my dreams, tantalizing but out of reach. I didn't make much of it.

As I got older, the dreams became more frequent, and I began to pay attention to them. I watched him. His eyes were dark brown, and I always felt as though I was absolutely loved when he turned those eyes on me. There were different versions of him. There was one, older, wiser, with a deep scar across his face. And the younger one, with long hair that constantly fell in his eyes. It was the younger one I first fell in love with.

The day I realized that I loved the dream man was a frightening one. It was so futile, I told myself. He was not real. But my longing would not be denied, and gradually I came to realize that he _was_ real. As I continued to dream, continued to watch him, I began to learn things about him. His name- Peter. And he lived in New York City. He could fly.

I began sleeping more. Every day, I would hurry home from my job and immediately throw myself into bed, desperate to return to the dreams, desperate to see him again. He was taking over my life. I had always been something of a dreamer, liable to shy away from reality, and now it was even more pronounced. I didn't return my phone calls, because I never checked my messages. I ignored my friends, hardly spoke to my family. My world quickly became about Peter, about falling asleep as quickly as possible so that I could be with him again. I started taking sleeping pills to help me reach him even more quickly. I hardly ate, just enough to sustain me.

When I lost my job, I hardly noticed. All the more time to spend with Peter. When I could no longer make payments on my apartment in Baltimore, I wasn't concerned. I packed my things and moved back into my old room in my parents house.

My sister still lived in her old room- but she payed rent. It was a good solution for Emma. She had been deaf since the age of nine, and our parents had always been very overprotective of her. They'd been unwilling to let her leave, and since the school for the hearing impaired where she now taught lip-reading was only a few blocks away, she continued to live with them. Her independent streak, however, would not let her stay without paying them rent. I had no such compunctions.

"Oh Amy," she said in her slightly off-tone voice, "what's happened to you? You used to be so ambitious. You were going to be the big executive someday. What changed?"

I smiled absently at her. "He changed me," I said, making sure she could see my face to read my lips. "The man in my dreams. Peter Petrelli. He lives in New York City."

Emma's face closed off, pinched tight with worry. She pushed a lock of her beautiful golden hair out of her eyes and put a hand on my shoulder. She didn't say anything, but her expressive grey eyes spoke volumes. I knew what she thought. It was what they all thought. _There goes Amy the Dreamer, lost in her fantasies again._

But this time, it wasn't a fantasy. Didn't they see that? He was _real_. I knew it. And so I kept sleeping, all day and much of the night. I usually only spent the wee hours of the morning awake. Sometimes I would eat.

And then my health began to fail me. Our family doctor didn't know what it was. My parents were worried, but I paid little attention to my body. It was only the wanderings of my mind that concerned me now. But one day I collapsed as Emma tried to coax me downstairs for breakfast.

They took me to the hospital and a team of doctors swarmed around me. I was too thin, they said, but not thin enough to be causing the problems. There was no real explanation for what was happening. It wasn't cancer. It was no disease they could put a name to. My muscles were weak and flabby from disuse. My organs were all malfunctioning, slowly shutting down. My lung capacity was reduced to almost nothing. My bone marrow had softened and appeared to be disintegrating. My heart was weak, but they couldn't pinpoint a reason. Everything was failing me. I was dying.

And still I dreamed. I swallowed their pills obediently, I allowed them to wheel me around in the chair they put me in to testing facilities, I let them stick me with their needles, and I ate their food. But when they weren't poking and prodding me, I slept, losing myself in Peter Petrelli's soulful eyes.

Finally, I woke no more, simply lying there, holding to life by the barest of threads. Or so they tell me. I don't know. I was unconscious, dreaming. He had taken over my life, and I wanted him simply to _take_ my life so that I could spend all eternity in my dreamworld with him.

That was the day they told my family that I had less than a week to live.

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**Yeah, this is a weird one, even for me. Expect an update by Tuesday.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Okay, I know I promised an update by last Tuesday. I'm sorry. Don't bite my head off. My internet service was shut down, so the only time I could upload documents was when I stole my mom's laptop and sat in the wifi zone outside the Dairy Queen. So it's been difficult to get around to FF. Sorry about that. Hopefully my internet will be up soon and I'll be back to regular updating.**

**And yes, I know, I ripped Emma's power off of X-Men, but seriously, it's SUCH a cool power, how can you NOT want to rip it off?**

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Although they never told me, it must have been Emma who went to look for him. Emma was always my perfect opposite. I faded into the background with my dark hair, nondescript hazel eyes and ruddy complexion, while Emma's blonde hair, pale skin and dark eyes gave her an elfin beauty I could never hope to match. I had always been timid, going with the flow and allowing everyone to walk all over me. She was fearless and gave no quarter when she wanted something. It was confounding to our parents, who, like me, were shy people who preferred to hide behind themselves rather than face the world and laugh as Emma did.

And so it must have been her- no one else would have gone chasing around New York with nothing to go on but a few words I had mumbled to her weeks before. The doctors had little hope for my survival, and my parents had less. But Emma was never one for giving up. I don't know how she found him, and I'm not even sure why she thought he could help me, but she did.

I was barely clinging to life when she brought him into the hospital. Mother always said later, in that romanticizing way she had that I was "fighting for life, struggling to survive," but she was wrong. I wasn't fighting anything. I was just drifting, waiting for the inexorable tide to take me past the edge I saw looming nearer and down into the fall of endless dreaming.

But something broke through the cold grip of the river's drift upon my soul. I could feel it, even from the dark place where I lay sleeping. The moment he stepped into the room, there was a heat licking across me. Slowly, the ice melted, and I began to drift upwards. I fought it at first, thinking they had found a way to pull me away from my dreaming. But I realized soon that this was not of the doctor's doing.

My eyes opened, and there was_ his_ face leaning over me, a concerned look in his dark eyes. For a moment, I could hardly breathe from the stunned revelation that he was here with me. Then a languid smile crossed my lips. "I've been waiting for you," I said. My eyes slid closed again, but this time it was true, deep sleep, untroubled by dreams of the man who sat beside me for the next few days, holding my hand.

--

The recovery was slow. Although the doctors said it was a miracle I had survived at all, and the fact that I had woken up was amazing, after that things crept along at a snail's pace. I was impatient. I wanted to be up and about so that I could get to know the man I had wasted away searching for.

But though they released me from the hospital, I wasn't well enough to do more than sit and talk to him. He told me about his power, and vented about it's transient nature. It had been stronger once, he said. He could hold on to dozens of abilities at once, but something had changed. I explained how I had dreamed of him for years, and finally was taken under by the visions.

"I was trapped in a dream once," he said.

Emma sat beside me on the porch, and Peter leaned against the railing across from us. "Was it a good dream?" Emma asked, watching his lips carefully as he replied.

He shook his head. "No. It was a prophecy, about a bomb in New York. I couldn't break out of it and nearly died of a fever."

"That's awful," I said.

Peter shrugged. "It was alright. We stopped the bomb."

"Not the bomb," Emma said, "You! I suppose that would've been awful too, but... well..." She trailed away and her cheeks flushed pink. I looked at her strangely, but I was too tired to try and puzzle out the look on her face. I'd never been any good at reading people anyway. I drifted a little, still, as well. I couldn't alway focus. The doctors assured me that it would pass, as my body recovered, and I believed them, too tired to dwell on anything else.

That was the same reason I missed what was happening over the following weeks, and months. While I was too hazy to even wonder why Peter- a man who barely knew me, even if I loved him with all my heart and mind- was spending months of his life living in the hotel down the road, Emma was getting to know him. And as she always did, with everyone, she charmed him. But of course, he wasn't the only one who was captivated. She, too, must have been caught up by Peter's easy ways and his quiet soul, just as I had been, in my dreams.

But I didn't know. I didn't _see_. How could I not have seen? How could I have missed the way her eyes lit up when he came over every afternoon? How was it that I didn't notice the way he moved around her, as if she was the fragile one and not I? And why did my dreams never tell me?

But that, I suppose, was just it. I was still lost to the dreams, in a way. Though the visions themselves had stopped, now that the subject was at hand, I still paid more attention to what I knew from my dreaming than to the man himself. Emma, on the other hand, in her bold way, worked her way into his life as thoroughly as he had worked himself into ours.

She started going with him on his patrols. They left Maryland and he flew them to New York City, and there I suppose they did the sort of things you would read about in comic books- rushing into burning buildings and rescuing kittens from trees and whatever else. I didn't pay much attention, too absorbed in my slowly mending body and my languid joy that Peter was really _here_ with me to see. It worried our parents sick, my baby sister going off to do god-knows-what with a real-life superhero. Their fears were baseless, though.

Emma, it transpired, had her own ability. Finally, when she couldn't stand their grousing and fretting any longer, she told us all what she had only confided in Peter up til now. She could transform at will into a girl with sparkling, diamond-hard skin, virtually indestructible. She showed us, and it took my breath away to see her there, standing in a shaft of light in the kitchen, glittering with a thousand facets of crystal. Emma looked so fragile, so easily damaged. She always did, but her new shining form doubled the effect. But I knew it wasn't true. Emma always was the stronger one, the braver one, the tougher one. She might have been younger than me, but she acted like the elder sibling. She had the bigger heart, the smaller ego, and a double portion of courage.

Really, it was no wonder Peter fell for her. That, I think, must have been what restored his powers. He told me how it worked one day when I was newly home from the hospital, about how he had to remember the people who had owned the powers to use them himself. And I had dreamed about him, too. I knew what had happened with his father, in an abstract sort of way. I knew how he had hardened and changed- the first step toward becoming the darker, scarred future him I had seen, and loved all the same. But Emma softened him. She took away the rough edges and helped him open up his heart again. And with that, came the other changes. His old powers began returning, one at a time. Electricity. Regeneration. Telekinesis. Phasing. Super-strength. I didn't recall the full list, being too hazy to really pay much attention. I was happy for him, but something had broken inside me when the dreams had taken me under, and I could do little more than smile and nod and tell him congratulations. Emma, on the other hand, was overjoyed and it was only with a great deal of protest that he managed to convince her that a party was _not_ in order.

I can't believe I didn't see it. Something so obvious... I should have known, even without my dreams giving me tantalizing whispers of truths half-known. But there came I time when I couldn't ignore it any more.

Peter and Emma were on patrol one hot July afternoon. As the sun sank down, I pulled absently at the neck of my T-shirt, sweating. Though the air conditioning was turned on, I felt stifled upstairs in my bedroom, which was where I spent most of my time. I made my way downstairs to step out onto the porch, hoping the breeze from the bay would cool me off.

But when I pulled open the oak front door, I was frozen in my tracks by the sight of the two of them standing on the front porch, locked in a tight embrace. He was kissing her passionately, and the sight of it rooted me temporarily to the spot, curling my hands into white-knuckled fists. A place in me that had remained iced over from my experience in the dreams suddenly melted, and bubbling-hot rage at Emma's unexpected betrayal bubbled up in me, driving a flush of crimson into my cheeks and tears to my eyes.

At the sound of the door, he pulled away from her. Emma couldn't hear the creak, but when he released her she looked around for a reason; her eyes met mine, and I could already sense the apology on her tongue as I whirled away, fleeing into the deep recesses of the house.


	3. Chapter 3

**This is the next-to-last chapter. There's going to be some character interaction in this chapter, to set up what happens in the final chapter, and that's really about all. I usually hate doing this, but this is just a filler chapter. And I'm afraid that Amy behaves rather badly in this chapter.**

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I can imagine how the moments after my flight from the atrium must have played out, even without being there. I knew Peter well, and I knew Emma _too_ well. He would have made to rush into the house after me, to try to make it all better the way he always did. But she would have laid a hand on his arm. _Let me talk to her,_ she would have said. _She's my sister. It's my place to make this right._ He would have smiled at her, those beautiful brown eyes going soft as he met her gray ones. _Alright, _he'd have replied. _I'll wait out here._

But I wasn't there, so I didn't have to suffer through the sight of their smiles and love. No, I was too busy drowning in misery, burning up from the inside with rage and anger.

I lay facedown on my bed, the heat that had driven me downstairs before suddenly a comfort, a distressing counterpoint to my own inner turmoil. I felt Emma enter, rather than heard her. Her hand descended on my shoulder, and I jerked away. "Go away!" I yelled into my pillow.

"Amy, talk to me." I swore at her. "Amy. Amy!" She was silent, and I chose to fill it with more choice words. She sighed. "Amy, I know you're cussing at me, and I know you know I can't hear it. Sit up so I can see you, will you?"

Tears were running down a crimson-stained face as I jerked upright and whirled to face her. "You want visual?" I screamed, shoving my hand in her face, middle finger extended. "I'll give you visual! I _love_ him, Amy! I loved him long before you even met him. I'd have died if he hadn't come. He came for _me_!" My voice broke as I continued, but I was too distraught to care. "I can't believe you would do this to me, my own sister! Have you forgotten everything I did for you when we were kids? Have you forgotten? After your accident, when you first lost your hearing, that day the kids were laughing at you, calling you names. Little Dumb Emma, they said. You were all alone. But I was there. I picked you up off the ground and I took you home and I cleaned the place on your elbow where you'd scraped it when they pushed you down. And how do you repay me? You betrayed me, Emma, after everything we've been through together!"

She shook her head sadly. "Amy," she said, holding my gaze. "Amy, I know. You're my sister, and I love you, and I never wanted to hurt you. All these months, I held back. I denied how I really felt about Peter. I told myself it would go away, and that it was just gratitude because he saved your life. But I couldn't. I just couldn't."

She was crying too now, but it only served to make her delicate face look even more fragile and lovely. I hated her for it. "So, what? You decided that some fling was more important than me? Than my _life_? I don't even know you."

"Oh Amy, don't say that! Look, I love Peter. I love him more than I would have ever believed is possible. But I know that's not fair to you. You... you need him. I can stand on my own two feet, and I'll get through. You've been ill; you need him right now more than I do."

"And what's that supposed to mean? Are you saying I'm weak? Because I'm not, Emma! I'm not! I'm not like you, but I'm not weak, either!"

She looked startled. "Of course not! Please, listen to me. I know you hate me right now, but I--"

I glared at her. "You'll what?" I demanded. "You'll end it? Yeah right."

Her face closed off briefly, as if she were steeling herself. I saw a deep pain and loss already behind her eyes, but I was too angry to care. "Yes," she said. "If that's what it takes. I love you, Amy. You're my big sister, and that's more important than anything."

Somewhere inside myself, I knew that I was being petty, but I couldn't stop myself. I was hurting and I was angry and I had never been very mature when I got mad. And so the resentment that I'd always hidden towards Perfect Emma bubbled to the surface and joined with the immediate rage and pain I was in and came spitting out my mouth. "You're not my sister!" I screamed. "You're... you're nothing! No, not nothing. You're worse than nothing. You're Little Dumb Emma."

The words had been her secret pain and shame for years, and I knew that. But I couldn't control them. Her eyes shut down, like a wall dropping down behind them. "Fine," she said, and stood up very slowly. With deliberate steps, she made her way out of my room, not bothering to shut the door behind her. I burst into hysterical tears and cried until my head hurt and my nose ran.

--

_Peter is waiting on the front porch, his hands in his pockets, leaning against the railing and looking over his shoulder at the quiet suburban neighborhood. When Emma emerges from the house he straightens up, turning to face her. He sees the tears running down her face and hurries to her. _

_But when he tries to pull her into a comforting hug, she pushes him away. "Peter," she says slowly, "We're kidding ourselves if we think this is going to work."_

_He stares at her, trying to understand. "What?"_

_"I gave it a shot, because you were so obviously infatuated and I didn't want to hurt you. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake, because I know I'm hurting you worse than rejection would have. Maybe I'd have been able to convince myself that I really did love you, with time. And maybe we would have been happy. I don't know. It's too late to bother, now. This isn't fair to Amy, and my own feelings aren't strong enough to justify it. I'm sorry, Peter. I really tried."_

_And with that, she's gone, hurrying down the front steps and whisking away down the sidewalk, almost floating. He watches her go, and his heart is breaking. As she disappears around a corner, he drops to his knees, shaking, unexpected tears welling up in his eyes. He just sits there, staring at the painted floorboards and allowing the tears to run down his cheeks. In all the torment he's endured over the last year and a half, in all the lost loves and sundered families, he thought he had seen the worst. He didn't know what the worst was. He didn't know there was _anything_ that could hurt like this..._

--

_This is irrational and I know it. I'm doing this because I'm angry- angry at Amy for what she said, angry at Peter for coming between us, even unintentionally, angry at myself for not being able to control my own feelings for him. And I want to prove Amy wrong, I suppose. I don't know how this is supposed to do that, but it makes sense to the stupid part of myself that comes to the surface in times like this._

_My heart is cracking into a thousand tiny pieces, each one of them a shard of pain stabbing through my ribcage. God, I love him so much I can't see straight. But what I'm about to do is incredibly dangerous, and if I can't handle it, it might be easier for him to bear afterward, if he thinks that it was one-sided. I don't know, but I have to try. And also, ending it will prove to Amy that I really do value our relationship more than anything. Even if she's hurt me more than I can say, I'm going to do this for her. For him. _

_Maybe I'm suicidal. I certainly feel like it right now. Nothing could possibly be worse than how I'm feeling right now. Death would be a release. And it certainly seems suicidal, going after him. Even at full power, Peter's barely his equal, and I'm definitely not Peter._

_But I'm indestructible, half the time. So what can he do to me?_

_I know where to find him. I'm going to do this. Even if I die trying, I'm going to make the world better, get him out of it. Things will be safer, then. Safer for Peter. Safer for Amy. Safe enough for them to catch their breath. Maybe in time he'll come to love her the way she loves him. After all, Amy is so much better than me, she's so good. Except when she's angry, of course. But no one can deny that she loves him, and no one can resist that level of devotion for long. They'll be happy, if this works. Well, they'll be happy if this DOESN'T work, but they'll also probably be sad, because I'll be gone..._

_God, this is so melancholy. Why am I doing this? It's illogical and it's impulsive and it's stupid and it's not like me at all. But I need to make things right. I love Amy. She's my sister. That's more important than anything. And if I have to die to make things right? Well, Peter's shown me his world. Sacrifices get made. He told me what Nathan did. I can do the same thing, in a way._

--

I jerked upright, gasping. Usually the knowing just came to me. It hadn't happened in dreams since I discovered Peter. But when I had fallen asleep just now, everything came rushing into my mind. I knew what Emma had just done. What she was still planning to do. I knew what was going to happen if she arrived there and carried out her plan. I knew she was going to die.

And I knew how to stop it all. The only question was... was I willing to make that sacrifice?


	4. Chapter 4

**Wow, it's been awhile since I updated this. Sorry. I got distracted by my Daphne/Peter fic, Speed of Sound. And if you like anything that makes Volume 3 come out non-suckish, I highly recommend this one to you. Seriously. Go read it. It has the potential to be some of my best stuff. I'm not kidding. It's really quite good (although I should probably make chapters a little longer), and it's about to get better. Okay, I'm done pimping my other stories. Here we go. Final chapter.**

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When I found Peter, he was curled up against the railing around the front porch, tears streaming down his face. I knew why. I had seen Emma do it. If I didn't _know_, I would have been angry. But I knew that she had only done it because she thought she was doing the right thing. For me.

"Get up," I said fiercely. He glanced up, amazed at the intensity of my tone. I knew now why he could never have loved me; the entire time he'd known me I had been so languid, a shell of the person I had been before the knowing began.

"Now," I said. "Get up. We have to go save Emma."

He tried to protest. "I can't, I can't see her, not now. I can't take--"

But I shook my head, interrupting him. "Peter, you idiot, she didn't mean it. She said those things for me! She's gotten it into her head that you'll come to love me the way I love you someday, and that her being with you is only going to cause unhappiness and pain. She's trying to sacrifice her own happiness for mine. And she's also decided that she's got to sacrifice _herself_ for the world. She's going after your great enemy, the one you've never been able to beat. Sylar, right? She thinks she can stop him, but she can't. She's going to get herself killed. That can't happen. Peter, look at yourself! Just thinking she doesn't love you has practically destroyed you. I don't think you'd survive if what I've seen happen happens. Emma can't fight Sylar on her own. But I can. I know how to stop him. _Now get up_! I need your help."

For a moment, he was dumbstruck, staring at me as if he'd never seen me before. Then he scrambled to his feet. "Amy, I--"

I held up a hand to stop him. "There's no time for that," I said. "We have to go."

"Go where?"

"Where do you think?" I said with a forced smile. "Emma's just as upset as you are. And I know her, she's my sister. When she gets upset, she gets maudlin. Her sense of the dramatic gets as overdeveloped as Sylar's. She's going to lead him to a place she thinks is suitable. She'll lure him to where this all began for you."

Peter's eyes showed adorable confusion, and my heart twisted inside me. I drank in every expression, knowing that I wouldn't be seeing him for much longer.

"But where...?" he asked. Then it clicked, and he nodded grimly. "Kirby Plaza."

"Yes. She'll be there. She left about two hours ago, didn't she?" I glanced up at the last faint glow of orange on the horizon to try and confirm my time. He nodded. "Then she's already reached the city. Probably already begun laying her trap. We've got five minutes before Emma's dead. I need you to fly me there."

At my words, a terrible look came over his face, a fierce protective glare that seemed directed at nowhere in particular. He picked me up very gently despite the emotions I knew were coursing through him. Before he took off, he glanced down at me. "Amy," he said quietly, "what are you going to do?"

"What I have to."

He looked like he wanted to ask more, but I wasn't talking and I let him know with a measured look. And so we set out, streaking in the direction of New York City.

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She was choking, struggling for air. Sylar had her grasped around the throat, strangling her. We could see it from above as we came soaring in. "Put me down somewhere out of sight," I whispered to Peter. "You can't be involved, not this time." His face was set in stone, but he landed carefully out of view behind a pillar. It was dark, and as always, Midtown was deserted after business hours. There was no one around to see. As my feet hit the ground, Emma's form slipped from diamond radiance back to her plain old human self. I kissed Peter gently on the cheek. "Wish me luck," I whispered.

"Thank you, Amy," he said.

I stepped forward, then paused and glanced back at him. "Peter? Whatever happens, don't do anything. Don't try to save me. You already did that. It's my turn to save you." And then I ran out into the middle of the plaza.

"Put her down," I said calmly. The dark-haired serial killer turned to face me, surprise written all over his face. Then he smirked, probably thinking I was easy prey.

But I was blazing with knowledge, literally shining from within, as the knowing awoke latent abilities deep within me. I was like them, in a way. Like Peter. Like Sylar. I couldn't take on the abilities of others. But I could understand what was necessary to do things. To shape things. It wouldn't last long. It would burn out soon. The knowledge was too much for my mind to handle, and I knew that too, and it was okay. It didn't need to last long.

The ground beneath me was gleaming in reflected radiance as I crossed the plaza with a measured step, until I was standing right next to Sylar and Emma. "Let her go," I said. "She's nothing to you. You could take a power like hers from any number of people. But me... well, there's nobody like me. And for good reason."

"Why would you do that, why would you take her place?" he asked as he released her. She fell to the ground with a grunt of pain. She stared up at me, watching my lips as I spoke.

I smiled. "Because she's my sister, and I love her," I said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I turned to her. "Emma, go. Now. Toward the building." She must have read what I intended in my eyes, because she leapt to her feet and ran to the building. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her throw herself into Peter's arms. My complacent smile widened. Sylar was mine.

He reached out a hand toward me, intending to split open my shining skull. But I had other plans. I raised my own hands, burning from within, and seized both of his in mine. And then I released it, all the knowing, through my hands and into his. All the knowledge in all the world, that had been pricking at the back of my mind since it first came to me, flowed out of me and surged through him. I gasped, staggering, as it left me.

Sylar's face was luminescent for a moment, transported in rapture. But I knew what was about to happen. It was too much for any one mind to handle. As I had told him, there was only one like me for a very good reason. The only thing that had saved me for this long was the drifting, departed state of mind I had been wrapped in for months now. I had been cut off from my own mind, disconnected. But Sylar... well, he was open wide, a hungry brain always ready for more power. And all that knowledge shooting through him would overload his system at any moment.

But I knew that I wouldn't see it. My time had already been spent. It had been a struggle to endure a functioning brain full of everything in the world even for the twenty minutes it had lasted. With one last flash, my inner brilliance died and I sank to the pavement, my vision going dark. Through a haze, I saw Sylar's face twisted into a mask of horrible pain...

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I still remember that night. I remember it like it was yesterday. The night my sister became the first in a long line of Sylar's victims to give her power willingly and without hesitation. I never really understood, although she had written it down in a letter and left it on her pillow so that we could understand. But she wrote it when she was filled to the top with her "knowing," and the wording was a little abstruse.

But whether I understand or not what really happened, I'll never forget the sight of Amy slumping to the ground in a small but triumphant heap. I tried to run to her, but Peter held me back. And then came the screaming (not that I could hear it, but Peter always said so).

Sylar dropped to his knees, howling in agony as his head, his chest, his entire body brimmed full of brilliant white light. At the time, I thought it must be Amy, drifting around inside him, destroying him from within. It wasn't, of course. It was just her power, driving him mad, tormenting him. Then, an entirely different shade of light, this time a deadly red-orange, crept through him. I felt Peter's chest rise against me in a gasp of horror. That was what tipped me off to what was happening. He was radioactive. We'd never even suspected it until now.

We thought he'd explode. Instead, he turned his power inward, trying to drive out the knowing, trying to clear his mind. He couldn't take it, even with the eidetic memory he'd taken from a waitress in Texas. It was too big for him, just as it had been too big for Amy. And the radiation burned him through, searing through him from the inside out. When he finally died, he was little more than a pile of radioactive dust drifting across the Plaza.

I'm not entirely sure how we got home that night. I suppose Peter must have flown us, because all I know is that somehow we were stumbling up the front steps, and I was crying, and Peter was carrying Amy's body, and my parents came running out of the house, and all I could think was "my parents now, not ours. No more Amy."

The funeral was held three days later. I don't really recall how I got through that, either. All my life, Amy had been my protector. Now, suddenly, that comforting presence I always knew would be right behind me to back me up was gone, and I felt terribly alone. That entire week was just a haze.

Peter stayed with us for awhile. He felt that it was his fault, I guess. But it was no more his than it was mine. We didn't talk much, not for days after the funeral.

But finally, about two weeks after that terrible night, Peter came into my room and took my hand. He told me that he loved me, that he would always love me. I was amazed. He'd never said that before. Well, neither had I, even though I had certainly been feeling it. After that, it became a little easier. We got through it together, somehow. It took a long time, but we managed to crawl up out of that dark place you go when someone you love dies.

We're married now, Peter and I. I never thought I would have this; never thought I would _want _this. But thank god I have it, because Peter's the best thing that ever happened to me.

There's only one thing that really bothers me about that night any more. I still miss Amy, but I know she had to go, I know she had to do it. But what gets to me is the fact that she probably saved the world from all the terrible things he might have done, and no one will ever know. No one will ever know about this wonderful thing that my brave sister did.

Oh, Peter's friends all know. A time-traveling duo from Japan, and a telepathic cop, and his immortal niece, Claire, and several others. And my parents know. But my sister, who in the end was a bigger hero than all of us, will never be recognized for her sacrifice. There'll never be a holiday named after her. There'll never be people who get drunk just to celebrate her memory.

Except us. Those of us that know, we do what we can to commemorate her sacrifice. Sometimes, on the anniversary, I wonder at it. It's a strange thing, really. Peter would never have come into our lives, and Sylar might never have been defeated, if it weren't for Amy's knowing. And she wouldn't have survived the knowing for so long if she hadn't been so cut off from life for so many months.

It all happened because one seemingly insignificant woman was taken under.

* * *

**Yeah, the ending kinda sucks, but I couldn't come up with a decent way to make it seem final beyond that. So review, 'kay? Just so you can tell me how much it sucked.**


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